So ubisoft has put out a fairly vacuous press release about some LLM project of theirs which, I understand, has gotten some positive buzz in industry circles
I'm going to level with you, I'd be embarrassed to publish a screenshot plastered all over with text that is this bad. This is bad even for LLM output; I don't know if or which parts of this are human-written (maybe the 'goals' are human-written and form part of the prompt?) but they are truly dire. This is bad for a tech demo, this is bad for placeholder text.
Publicly praising this stuff or attaching your name to it, in my mind, puts you somewhere on the rube-grifter spectrum... like what's the outcome you think you want here? That you're left after Ubisoft throws the discarded husks of your colleagues in the trash? Or are you not even thinking about that and are of such a bovine disposition that you're going to praise the company dogfood right up to the day when they shove you into the meat grinder?
I try to bring empathy and generosity of spirit to bear on the individual workers who make it work in this profoundly stupid, benighted industry. But nothing makes me angrier than seeing alleged 'creatives' go to bat for their own disposability.
This stuff isn't going to take off, and there's a reason why I feel pretty confident about that assertion. It has nothing to do with whether the text output is good enough, or if the text-to-speech is good enough. (I don't think either of those will ever be good enough, for what it's worth.) This tech won't take off because gamers don't want to talk to their consoles, and PC gamers don't want to type dialog. It's the same reason why "smart speakers" are on a massive decline, and most people use Siri once or twice before dropping it. There is strong pressure against talking to machines. Because of social norms, yes, but also because speaking is often less convenient. Situations where speaking is more convenient are niche.
And with games, the pressure to not have to speak is even stronger. You know how a lot of contemporary game design is built around helping the player remember what tf they were doing and what they need to do next? Imagine not being able to advance in a game because you can't remember a character's name, or can't think of an important plot point that needs to be brought up to an NPC. The way you solve for that is essentially feeding the details to the player, at which point you may as well just have canned dialog options with canned responses. Imagine having to repeat your own custom lines because you died or had to reload. It would be a terrible experience. People often are uncomfortable role-playing dialog in a TTRPG, and that's among friends. Now imagine players doing that with a machine that can barely understand them half the time.
Were any of this tech to become "good enough," it would still be a specific kind of experience, different from all games you play now, probably more like how you might play an "experience" at an expo or something. In other words, a minuscule market segment, that isn't worth this much investment.
There are enough actual gamedevs on here that I'm basically preaching to the choir but people have been able to make reasonably workable "chatbot" NPCs for YEARS now, long before LLMs and generative output, and the reason they're not in all games is because -you don't want to put chatbot npcs in most games- for the same reason you don't want a totally accurate simulation of a smartphone in most games: Because doing that makes the game -about- that thing and not about what the game is actually about, and it's also a ton of work the game doesn't actually need to do the job it needs to do.
Stunts like this speak to what a lot of people who don't play games (like investors and executives and VCs) think about games, which is that the ultimate goal of all game design and technology is the holodeck - a perfect magical simulation where a machine runs everything and reacts dynamically, when the actual games people make, play, and sell, are anything but what you'd see in even the most fanciful Star Trek Holodeck concepts. Even the most "simulation-y" games are full of convenient abstractions not because we're somehow limited by the capacity of technology or human effort, but because even games that have realistic simulation as an explicit, stated, goal simply don't need that shit to feel real enough.
There are definitely simulations out there for whom this sort of thing might theoretically slot in (all -other- negative concerns and externalities aside), but ultimately those are just a small slice of what games are, and the notion that this stuff will ever readily slot into existing genres and game designs without rendering them something else entirely is a grift designed to sway rubes.
